I have set up this site, primarily, to pen down my passing reflections, thoughts and important quotes from Habermas, in the hope to get some stimulating reactions.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Defending Habermas (2)

"Andreas Zielcke sets the Habermas story straight, quoting historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler: "Habermas was no Hitler Youth leader. For reasons of his harelip alone, he could never have had a leadership function under the Nazis. In actual fact, at 14 he did give first-aid classes in the Hitler Youth, for which he'd been trained as an orderly. His tasks included reminding participants who missed classes to attend punctually with so-called 'call letters.' These were preprinted forms in which the instructor simply had to fill in with the participant's information and then sign his name." Wehler had received one such reminder from Habermas, Zielcke writes, but stories that Habermas literally swallowed the form when he was confronted with it years later are false."

No comments:

Habermas is a German philosopher -- "the leading systematic philosopher of our time," Richard Rorty of the University of Virginia calls him. But Habermas comes to this debate as much more than just a philosopher. "In terms of range and depth there is no one close to him," says Thomas McCarthy, a professor of humanities and philosophy at Northwestern University. "Habermas has been able to go into discussions in political theory, in sociology, in psychology, in legal theory -- in a dozen different disciplines -- and become one of the dominant voices in each one."

About Me

I am a philosopher by training. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Habermas and the possibility of transcendence from within. Beside Foucault and Habermas, I am interested in the work of Robert Brandom,John McDowell, and Charles Travis.